


Hypnagogic

by CaughtAGhost (ghosthan), ghosthan



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: AI Tony Stark, Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Art, Artificial Intelligence Tony Stark, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Guilt, Hydra Steve Rogers, KIND OF I GUESS, M/M, Murder, Secret Empire (Marvel), Suicidal Thoughts, Tony Stark (AI) - Freeform, Unhappy Ending, seriously this is miserable turn back now, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:33:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28598505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghosthan/pseuds/CaughtAGhost, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghosthan/pseuds/ghosthan
Summary: [Hypnagogic state: the period immediately before sleep, or between wakefulness and sleep, during which hallucinations can occur.]“Fine. You want an enemy?” Steve says, bloody saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth, “I’ll give you someone to hate.”_________'You Gave Me A Stocking' fill for Kiyaar, fic and art.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 17
Kudos: 27
Collections: You Gave Me A Stocking 2020





	Hypnagogic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kiyaar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/gifts).



> Please mind the tags. Happy winter holidays and Valentine's day, Kiyaar! We have some overlapping taste in tropes/themes. I saw that you enjoy angst, death, miserable stuff, and Secret Empire. This was a good chance to flex those muscles. I hope it hits the spot for you.
> 
> Big thanks to Oluka (lomku) for doing some last minute beta-ing for me, and giving me the confidence to actually publish the fic, and not just post the art alone.
> 
> Art at end of story.
> 
> xoxo

* * *

Tony waits in the lowest level of the bunker as Hydra’s war shakes the Earth above. 

It’s his personal apocalypse when Steve steps into the dim light of Tony’s holographic face, in his green gold uniform— a snake. The world as Tony knows it ends when he looks in Steve’s eyes and sees him for who he really is. This is no stranger wearing a stolen face. Steve is Hydra, and it’s the end of the world.

It isn’t the first time, but it will be the last: they destroy each other, and everything in their path.

Steve, brutal but painstakingly careful, aims to incapacitate, nonfatal. 

“I’ve come to change your mind,” he says, “I want to change your mind, and if I can’t today, then I’ll find a way in time. You can be rewritten. You could be happy.”

Tony laughs, empty, “If you think that’s true you don’t know me at all.”

“I can _fix_ you,” Steve says, pleading. “You’ll see. I’m still me. I know you.”

“You don’t,” Tony says. He knows he’s wrong.

“I do,” Steve says, stepping closer. Tony lets him, the space between them shrinking, “I know you loved me, once.”

Tony is a hologram, a ghost: he doesn’t breathe, but the sensation of having the breath sucked out of his lungs feels just as real. Steve slinks closer, approaching him like a scared animal.

Steve says, “You loved me, and you’ll love me again. You could be happy.”

They’ve never said it before, and now suddenly in the open, it feels obscenely explicit. To try and put into those few words the complexity of Tony’s feelings which he has so poorly hidden, he thinks, love doesn’t begin to capture it. He thinks, I’ve loved you before this iteration of myself was even born.

Steve grabs Tony by the arm and Tony, rendered wordless and stunned still, is vulnerable for as long as Steve needs. He takes advantage of the moment to gain the upper hand, pressing his knee to Tony’s chest plate and pinning him to the ground, flat on his back.

“Can you feel?” Steve asks, hovering just inches above Tony’s face, breathing hard. He studies Tony’s expression with curious eyes, like he already knows whatever Tony says will be a lie.

“No,” Tony breathes, half a truth, half a lie.

Watch his nose grow, little puppet boy tangled up in his own strings. He has no flesh or nerves, but feeling doesn’t truly live in the flesh, anyways. Tony’s artificial mind has the infrastructure to convince him of pain, false synaptic function replicating memories of hurt, lighting up his systems. Warped and distilled into something removed from— but just as brutal— as the true thing. Unbound from a body, there is no limit to that which he can endure, no point his body and brain take mercy on him and go into shock.

(And there are other ways to hurt someone, without flesh or bone. There are other ways to bleed a man, to take that vital thing from the warm place inside and make it cold. Can he feel? If he truly could not, this would be easy.)

“You can’t. Not anything at all?” Steve asks, an unrecognizable expression flickering across his face. 

“Disappointed?” Tony says. “You want to hurt me that bad?”

It’s exactly the thing to say to cut Steve to the bone. He doesn’t hide the guilt well as he swallows it back and slams Tony down, hard against the floor.

“Stop,” he says. “Don’t do that. You know that isn’t true.”

“I don’t know you at all, anymore,” Tony says.

He’s never seen Steve look so sad. “I know you want to believe that.”

Tony hits him, square across the jaw, without trying to roll out from under him. Steve spits.

“You want to hate me,” Steve says.

“Shut up.”

“Fine. You want an enemy?” Steve says, bloody saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth, “I’ll give you someone to hate.”

Like two prey birds locked in a death dive, they tear each other apart, a blur of fists and blood and metal, rolling across the floor. Steve is surgical with the shield, but he's a human body and his precision wanes as Tony breaks him. The truth is, it isn’t a fairly matched fight. Steve has nothing but his shield and his grit, matched against Tony’s weaponized suit. And Tony can’t truly be hurt, only disabled. 

That’ll change when Steve’s backup finds them, but for now, they’re alone, and Tony does what he does best: he wears Steve out.

“Stop fighting, don’t make me do this,” Tony begs.

If looks could kill; Steve glares at him, blood in his eyes. He doesn’t understand, Tony thinks. Between blows, Steve trembles. His muscles are weakening, and he sways, gravity fighting against him. 

“You’re too used to making a martyr of yourself,” Steve spits, feinting left and slamming his shield into Tony’s chest. Tony stumbles back, injured worse by the words than the wound. “You can’t stand to see someone else bleed for a cause. You can’t stand to be the bad guy.”

Something dark flashes in Tony’s face. “I’m always the bad guy.”

And then they bring the sky down. 

Deep underground in that empty bunker, spiderweb cracks form in the concrete, and dust sprinkles from the ceiling. They notice it too late. The shield zings through the air like a blade, and as Tony realizes his mistake just after he lurches out of its path.

“The wall—”

“What?”

The shield strikes. It collides with a support column just behind where Tony has been standing before bouncing back at an odd trajectory, that Steve barely manages to catch. It’s like watching the Titanic sink.

The walls around them seem to groan, breath held before the fall. Then, great pieces of concrete crack and rubble begins crashing to the ground— for a moment, they both freeze, waiting to see if they’ll be buried alive in thousands of tons of debris. Tony doesn’t see it coming— the chunk of concrete above him— until Steve yells his name and pulls him abruptly out of the way by his arm. Tony stumbles into his arms, and as the world collapses around them, neither of them move. For that moment, they hold each other, as though they weren’t in the middle of a death match.

But it holds. The shaking stops, after what feels like a long time.

The ceiling holds, and they’re surrounded by the wreckage of the collapsed section, but neither of them have been crushed. But it’s a hollow blessing: the only exit is gone, buried. They’re blocked in. The dust settles in plumes around them, making Tony's hologram grainy like fine particles floating through a projector’s beam. 

They stand there, pressed close together. Tony pulls away.

Steve says, breathing ragged through a broken nose, says, “You hate this.”

Tony turns away. There’s a secret burning inside of him. Steve lowers his shield to his side and every step Tony takes away, Steve steps closer, until Tony is backed up to a chunk of concrete and can’t back away any further. 

“I don’t want to hurt you. You’re making me.”

“We all know no one could ever make you do anything, Tony,” Steve says. 

Don't make this harder. (He always does.)

“You’re not who I thought you were.”

Steve presses into Tony’s space, and he drops the shield on the ground with a hollow clang. As though to touch Tony’s cheek, he reaches out toward his face; Tony’s eyes flutter shut, but the caress never comes. Steve’s hand passes through him like a ghost.

“You can forgive yourself,” Steve says, miserably gentle, “For not seeing it coming. For not stopping it. For loving me anyways. I can fix you, make you happy. I can give you a home, and you want that.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re not a good liar.”

The irony is so cruel Tony has to laugh.

_Steve_ has come to take Tony alive.

_Tony_ has come with a hidden blade, and the phantom sensation of a lump in his throat.

* * *

The ending is written before it starts, and Steve doesn't see it coming. It replays in Tony’s mind over and over, as vivid as the real thing.

It has been over for almost an hour, during which Tony has not moved, kneeling at Steve’s side, eyes blank with abject horror. Neither of them disturb the quiet by breathing. The silence swaddles their bodies, thick as bog mud. One an empty corpse and the other a disembodied spirit. Nothing living here.

Are you happy?

Tony holds Steve’s head in his hands, his body stiffly draped across Tony’s thighs. The longer he looks, the more unreal it becomes, swimming like a mirage. Like an optical illusion, the image shifts back and forth. Death, sleep. He could be sleeping, if not for the blood, but his features are somehow too delicate for the brutality of death. Steve’s eyelashes are flecked with blood. His hair, bloody. Red mouth. The green gold of his uniform stained dark across the middle.

He stares at the Hydra symbol emblazoned across the chest so long it loses meaning, and the tentacles undulate in time with his swimming vision. It sears accusingly back at him. 

The head is too heavy, the neck and hands and fingers uncharacteristically limp where they should be tense. Tony has known Steve’s body a long time, and now it’s a ghoulish caricature of intimate memories. There were nights when all they had to say to each other could be said only between bodies; nights spent dancing on the line between resentment and longing, betrayal and trust, pain and pleasure. Tony used to kiss the sweat off Steve’s skin and trace shapes on his skin with the tip of a fingernail, long after falling asleep.

This is his perfect hell; no devils, no fire. Cold cement speckled with the blood of his Judas, forever entombed in a casket of red and gold. You know what you've done to earn this, he thinks. Hands unclean, reborn bloodied every time he uses up another one of his nine lives. He used to think of himself as just a man among Gods, mortal flesh, unenhanced-- painfully mortal. The joke is on him and the whole universe laughs, cosmic curse: you shall walk the Earth till the Earth rots, and your rusting exoskeleton will run red long after all the blood runs dry.

And Steve. Always running out of time. Born to die too young for his grave, perpetually, youthful and cut short, a Greek tragedy carved into marble. This is their mythos: Steve dies beautiful, and Tony lives in his own ugliness. 

From the armor comes a chirping alert. 

_Power supply damaged. Remaining power limited. Switching to energy conserve mode._

“What?” Tony looks down at his chest where a dull light glows, scraped and dented by Steve’s efforts to shut Tony down. Damaged.

“Fuck. Run diagnostics,” he says. He waits.

_Unable to diagnose hardware failure. Replace power supply immediately. Remaining power limited. Halting extraneous functions and diverting power to critical systems. Weapons offline._

“Override.”

_Unable to override, remaining power limited._

“Override, _damnit._ ”

_Replace power source immediately._

Tony looks toward the exit, buried, and his heart drops.

“Fuck. No. No. _No._ ” 

In their final fight, Steve had cracked the gleaming disc at the center of Tony’s chest; it hadn’t mattered in the moment. Now he realizes that he had orchestrated events just right to earn his own end. The damage runs deep, but if he could leave and replace the power supply, it wouldn’t matter. If he had enough power to use weapons, he could easily blast his way through the rubble and leave. Yet he can do neither. This seems appropriate. This seems earned. Cosmic balance, approaching entropy. A death for a death. All his artificial life hemorrhaging out of him while Steve had bled out in his lap.

Tony needs to go _now_. As if to remind him or the urgency of his situation, the ground rumbles again as another dumb shakes the Earth, somewhere far away. Dust and bits of debris rain down from the cavernous ceiling. Tony shields Steve’s body with his own, like it would be desecration of a corpse to allow any more dust to touch him.

There is no way to push Steve’s body off of his lap that isn’t grotesquely irreverent. He lays Steve down gently. His head still hits the floor too hard, sickeningly limp. He avoids looking at the body as he scrambles to his feet, power alarm bleating internally. Tony is caught clumsily between the finality of laying Steve’s body down, and the frantic desperation of his own situation. The glow of his suit and his face dim to a fraction of its usual brightness, ghastly; he’s the impression of light echoing behind closed eyelids a moment after staring directly into the sun.

Trapped in this bunker, destroyed by Hydra’s bombs shaking the Earth, Tony has no chance of escaping without the ability to obliterate the obstructive rubble. They are deep underground, and very alone. Tony’s allies are scattered, and mostly dead. An army of headstones. And when Hydra eventually finds them, finds Steve, Tony would rather be dead when they come than be taken.

Stepping away from the blood at his feet, he wills the armor to move, wills the tech to charge up and shoot a beam of concentrated energy at the obstruction at the door. 

Ready, aim, fire. 

There’s an electric hum, and a whine, and nothing happens. Just as he knew it would; he’s shooting blanks. 

_Insufficient power._

_Power supply damaged. Remaining power limited. 20 percent power remaining._

“Emergency override, ” he tries, to no avail. It’s fruitless. He’s a fly sinking in honey, a glutton’s hell. You wouldn’t be here if you never loved him.

Without power, there is no escape. He tries uselessly to push against he blockade with his restricted strength. Nothing. The reality encroaches in closer, like a circling pack of wolves finally letting their presence be known seconds before the kill.

With his power cell losing energy at this pace, he will shut down soon. Tony slams his fist on the chunk of concrete rubble blocking the door in a futile, final gesture-- punctuating the end of his life, and the start of his afterlife. 

(Or had his afterlife begun with a blur of ones and zeroes, blue light birthed from darkness, consciousness born from numbers? His flesh body sleeps in a hermetically sealed glass coffin, Snow White, _wake me with a kiss._ )

It isn’t worth it. The ground still shakes, bombs fall and the world ends, and Tony doesn’t even have an uncorrupted good memory to comfort himself with: everything he has ever known has been a lie. He sealed his own fate— his and Steve’s both— with the sticky, drying blood of traitorous stab wounds. He deserves to rot here.

Steve Rogers lies dead on the floor a few feet from where Tony stands. Smeared, rusty red handprints stain the front of his uniform over the puncture wounds, where Tony had tried to apply pressure. Cooling blood pools in his parted mouth, agitated to bruising by Tony’s pathetic attempts at administering panicked, regretful mouth-to-mouth, 

before he had remembered--

\-- _why isn’t it working, why won’t his chest inflate, two breaths, ten compressions, one hundred beats per minute, why isn’t it working, why won’t he breathe--_

\--that Tony doesn’t _have_ a mouth, or lungs, or any breath to give. The sudden, disoriented horror as it dawned on him for the thousandth time, (his disembodied condition). How could he have bruised Steve’s mouth without having touched him?Disconnected from reality, he’s spinning out. His imperfect artificial intelligence propagates all of the flaws of his human predecessor; it’s a fallible replica of a fallible mine, prone to all the same idiosyncrasies and human folly. Designed to malfunction by a sick brain.

His pseudo-mind has begun replacing undesirable truths with more palatable, easier to understand versions. He can _remember_ breathing into Steve’s mouth. He remembers the sensation of their mouths touching, teeth bumping.

It couldn’t have happened, of course. Phantom memories swimming among the real, all interchangeable and intangible and dizzying.

He spends an eternity between false breaths, in free fall, wallowing in revulsion and confused horror at the post-mortem bruising on Steve’s face. How did I do that?

How did that happen? 

He sees himself hunched over Steve’s face, telling him to breathe, hands on his face. The bruises had come from Tony’s _hands_. Some glitch-riddled flesh memory psychosis had set him moving on autopilot, convinced that he was breathing life into Steve when all he was doing was frantically prying his lips open with metal hands. The mind sees what it needs to see, he thinks. 

If he imagines Steve carefully and focuses, he can see his chest rise and fall, lungs filled with imagined image breathed into him by Tony’s will alone. It’s an illusion, of course. He dares not look at the real body, for fear of breaking his own mirage. 

There is less life in Tony’s artificial body than in Steve’s corpse.

_Power supply damaged. Remaining power limited. 15 percent remaining._

Time is running out.

Having left Steve’s side— having turned his back on the corpse for the first time since Steve transitioned from man to body— a creeping feeling sets in which had not been there before. 

Dread freezes Tony in place for a solid minute before he wills himself to turn back and see Steve’s body from across the room. The only light comes from Tony’s heart, a dying star. In the dim, blue, glow, and with a bit of distance, Steve really looks the part.

Dead. He isn’t sleeping. Can’t be woke with a kiss. There’s no undoing what Tony has done. And even if there was, there would be no way to bring back the version of Steve he had loved-- that Steve had only ever existed in Tony’s mind.

It would be sacrilege, now, to step any closer. What had been a death embrace ended the moment Tony rolled Steve’s body onto the ground; that moment was now firmly sealed in the past. If Tony was to touch Steve’s face now, or cradle his head, it would be violating the grave. Somewhere between Tony laying him down and turning his back, Steve, the ghost of him, his essence, has left. It’s just Tony, now, and a dead flesh thing.

The armor’s power will run out, and he will die, too. (He hopes that this time, it will take.) 

The funny thing about his after-afterlife is how sickeningly human Tony catches himself feeling. In these moments of amnesia, somewhere between the present and the past, when he doesn’t actively think of himself as artificial, he feels so real that it _hurts_ ; those ones and zeroes replicating too-effectively coded sense memories, firing false synapses. When he forgets all else, Tony remembers how to hurt.

Gut wrenching, chest constricting, free-fall: manifestations of reflexive expectation. Phantom feeling. His whole body, his mind, and soul, phantom limbs.

The armor says, _Power supply damaged. Remaining power limited. 10 percent remaining._

At least he’s fading fast. He drops to his knees, metal hitting concrete with a disharmonious clang. His fingers try to rake through his hair, a self-soothing tic, and it feels like the soul has been sucked out of him when his hands go right through his head. He folds, he could rip his chest apart, he’s reeling. Too much.

Death loop _,_ he thinks. He’s a ghost. He’s a ghost.

Teetering on the edge between here-and-now, and there-and-then, but there-and-then aren’t really there, and here-and-now aren’t really now. He’s alive but not real. Real but not alive. How can something dead die? It feels like loss. It feels like terror and exhaustion, alone with whatever reality conjured by his own masochistic imagination. 

Did he love you back?

Steve’s head is turned at nearly a ninety degree angle and his eyes are open. He stares at Tony without blinking. Tony’s gaze drifts, ashamed.

There are two puncture wounds in Steve’s abdomen. Tony had stabbed him twice before he lost his nerve. He had planned to stab him three times, between the ribs, each hit planned and carefully aimed for a vital organ (playing the odds.) But the fight had gone on so _long_ , because Steve wouldn’t put Tony down, and Tony had been too coward to just finish what he started. He had danced around it as long as possible.

He wanted to bring Tony home.

Steve had fallen to his knees after only the first stab.

Even on his knees, his self righteousness was indomitable. It was something in his eyes. The way he tilted his chin up at the world like he was daring someone to make him put his head down. The way he met eyes with Tony: do you have anything to say for yourself?

“I’d expect this. From them. But you?” Steve had said, somehow shocked and scolding simultaneously. His voice had been strained, Tony could hear the air rattle in his the back of his throat, “It’s still me. It’s been me, all along.”

(Tony hears it now, remembering, rewind, play, rewind, play. But you? But you? But you?)

Tony had felt phantom tears in his phantom eyes, a phantom burning. A phantom heart beating out of his cracked chest. 

“I only ever did what I thought was right.”

“I know.”

Steve had said, “You’re the bravest man I ever knew. And you’re braver than I thought.” 

“This isn’t bravery,” Tony says.

Steve’s eyes shine. “Look at you.”

“I’m sorry,” Tony had said. He knelt and cradled Steve’s head in his hands as he slid the knife in again, carefully. (Tenderly.) Steve’s body jerked, and spasmed. Blood bubbled at his lips, dark and red and so hot it _steamed_ in the freezing underground air. 

That was when Tony had been supposed to insert the knife a final time.

His will betrayed him, though, and everything went off script. Distantly, he had heard the knife clatter as it hit the ground. His hands were wet with Steve’s blood, smearing it through his hair, across the crest of his cheek bone. 

_Oh God._

“Finish it,” Steve had tried to say. Tony was frozen, stunned.

(He gurgles and chokes on his own blood. And Tony, the coward, lets him suffer because he was panicked and frozen and greedy for the precious few moments remaining of Steve’s life.)

“Please,” Steve had choked. That’s how Tony remembers it, but it sets him spiraling again, questioning the fallibility of his memory. Steve wouldn't beg. Steve had begged. Steve would never beg. But he said said,

Please,

And Tony had said nothing. Had Steve begged?

Tony just held him across his knee as Steve slowly went limp, pleas unanswered. Head lolled to the side, too lax, like a puppet. Like a doll. And then he died. 

It was only after his heart stopped that something snapped inside of Tony, triggering him to press the wound so hard ribs cracked to stop the already-slowed bleeding. Trying to give CPR. Oh God. What have I done. What have I done. 

_Power supply damaged. Remaining power limited. 5 percent remaining._

Time passes differently when you’re not real. Tony is hyper aware of every nanosecond passing, with a computer’s precision. On the other hand, a second means precious little unanchored to the rhythms of a living body. 

A computer can find eternity in the breadth of a second. Tony slumps against a hunk of concrete, gaze fixed on Steve’s corpse, a forced confrontation with his horror. With his shame. It replays in his head without his permission. Over and over. 

He kills Steve 432 times. It lasts forever. Every time he calls Tony brave. He was born to be a martyr.

It trips him up every time, when Steve begs. Glitch in the system. Can’t quite conjure his face, a blurry field of pixels where his eyes should be.

_Power supply damaged. Remaining power limited. 1 percent remaining, powering down in sixty seconds._

It had really been Steve.

_59… 58… 57…_

Steve had begged. Him. Not a clone. Not an LMD. Not a double. No mind control. No magic. No Skrull.

The knife slid in like butter.

_45… 44… 43..._

If there is hell, he will meet himself there in all previous iterations. All of them dead. All of them sinners.

_31… 30… 29…_

And Tony knows he’s twice damned. He weighs his crimes. Which is worse: that he killed Steve, or that he tried to save him? 

His light flickers, animating Steve’s face in ghastly shadows.

_14… 13… 12…_

“I’ll see you there,” Tony says aloud to Steve’s body, but he knows with a mix of dread and relief that this is not true. There’s nothing for them, sinners and ghosts and imposters.

_5… 4… 3…_

It probably won't take. Tony's curse has always been simple, no rest for the wicked. 

Then something occurs to him, something he hadn’t tried. His jolts into an upright position, startled by the brilliant simplicity of the realization. An escape he hadn’t considered, that would solve at least that problem. He thinks, I can get out if I—

* * *

end

**Author's Note:**

> you might be wondering why tony chose to use a knife rather than the weaponry of the suit and the answer has multiple parts. firstly, i think steve would be too well prepared generally against tony's typical attacks, and would be able to shield pretty well, so using a different, unexpected short-range method rather than the very ostentatious, long-rang light show of just. blasting. would catch steve off guard.
> 
> uhhh but mainly because drama. and sexiness. idk I really enjoy writing hydra steve
> 
> Again, happy holidays/valentine's day


End file.
